A little birdy tells me that Colin, M1BUU, has achieved Mountain Goat today on a wild and windy Whernside (G/NP-004).A hearty congratulations. Quite apart from the wind, rain and cold, I believe Colin will be along, when he's had time to defrost, to tell us just how hard the qualifying activation was

I'd been listening out for him but unfortunately no inter G propagation on 14Mhz

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Being a prolific builder of radio kits, I thought I would do my own twist on Extreme Ironing - Extreme Solder Ironing!

Today was the day. I took a RockMite kit, a home made key kit and a home made vertical antenna kit up to the summit of Whernside G/NP-004. I assembled the kits using a gas powered soldering iron. Thankfully I took my little tent with me, the weather wasn't exactly tropical.

The kits went together well and the RockMite fired up first time without any debugging, although the building took much longer than I had reckoned.

I was late on air, but eventually Barry N1EU found me for my first contact. Shortly after followed SP9AMH, OH9XX and finally EU2MM to earn me my needed points. Mountain Goat was in the bag! The QSB was very evident today, QSO's were tough, except with OH9XX, who was ear blasting.

Firing up the FT817 (I intended to share my success with as many as possible!), I worked a handful more stations on CW and SSB, but my time was rapidly dwindling.

Finally, I'd like to say thanks for all the support given by numerous SOTA paticipants over the years, There's a number of great, inspirational people we've lost in that time and I think about lots of them all the time. Roger G4OWG was particularly on my mind today as I learned of the route I took today from one of his posts. I never met Roger in person, but he was a keen chaser and fairly local to me.

Congratulations Colin. And constructing your radio for the MG activation AFTER reaching the summit? Wow - that is quite something! It's difficult to find anything to do that is a "first" in SOTA 15 years in, but you could well have come up with one here! Amazing!